The American Welsh stick chair I built in London last week. It’s made from European oak.
When I travel overseas, I sometimes take melatonin to help my body adjust to a new time zone. The good news: I think it works. The weird news: I have the strangest dreams when I take it.
This month, I’m in the U.K. to teach a few classes, take in some sights and do some serious chair research in High Wycombe, Wales and Ireland. Right now, I’m in London teaching a couple classes organized by Derek Jones at the school where he works, London Design & Engineering UTC.
On the night after my plane arrived, I was tossing about in the hotel bed, worried about the details of the chair class that was to begin the next morning. I took a tablet of melatonin and dreamt of chairs.
In the dream, I made a stick chair using plywood. The plywood arm was only one piece (and it had a doubler laminated on top). Here was the weird part – I was totally calm about the one-piece arm because there is no short grain in plywood.
Then I saddled the plywood seat and was fascinated by revealing the plies below with a travisher. It was like making a topographic map. The legs and crest were also plywood. The sticks were solid wood (I think).
When I woke up, I took a long hot shower to calm my pre-teaching jitters and realized that my dream wasn’t entirely stupid. In fact, by the time I had dried myself off, I had resolved to build a plywood stick chair.
Yes, I know you don’t like it. Please file your complaints with our Complaint Office.
Heck, I don’t even know if I like it, but I do know that I have to build it. When an idea gets under my skin – even a stupid idea – the only way to exorcise it is to construct it. So I’m going to pick up some Baltic birch ply when I get home and give it a go.
During his long career as a chairmaker, Chris Williams has heard stories of people filling up shipping containers of Welsh stick chairs and sending them to the United States. (You also hear stories – shudder – of people chopping them up and burning them for fuel.)
Last week, I saw another piece of evidence that the migration of Welsh stick chairs to North America was something that has really happened. As I was packing up to leave the shop at Wyatt Childs Inc. last week after a week of building French workbenches, Bo Childs drove up the shop in his white pickup truck with two stick chairs in the bed.
His father had brought them over from the U.K., and he wanted me to have a look at them.
We took the chairs over to the lawn behind his house and gave them a quick inspection. I was trying to get on the road to catch a plane to London (crazy life), so I didn’t get to document them completely. Maybe next time.
What I saw was one chair (above) that clearly is a Darvel chair, a Scottish stick chair. And based on the turnings, it’s likely one that’s earlier in their history.
For me, what was most interesting about the Darvel chair was the spindle deck. It’s slightly raised and rabbeted, like the deck on my chairs. I’ve not seen this detail on an old chair. I hope to investigate this chair a little more next time I’m in Georgia and can look for tool marks.
The other chair bears all the hallmarks of a Welsh stick chair (Chris Williams also said it looked Welsh to him). The armbow looked like it was made from a curved branch. And the seat’s shape matched the arm. The seat itself is massive and thick with a slight bevel on its underside.
Also interesting to see was that some of the mortises in the arms were blind. And when we looked under the arm it was apparent that the maker had made a few mistakes in locating these blind mortises (there was also evidence of this in the chair’s seat).
These “errors” didn’t take anything away from the appearance of the chair. I love it.
Other details I noticed on my quick investigation: The chair had an H-stretcher and was missing the middle bar of the H. Also, what is difficult to convey with these photos is how massive the components are. The legs are quite thick – much thicker than I would typically make in a chair.
As always, seeking out and encountering the “real thing” is an education that’s worth more than 1 million clicks on the internet.
For me, the jack plane is as essential as the hatchet is to a green woodworker. Or a drawknife is to a traditional chairmaker. The jack plane (sometimes called a fore plane) gets furniture parts to shape in a huge hurry, and with only a little effort.
Most woodworkers who show up at our door don’t have a proper jack plane. Their tools might look like jack planes, but they’re set up all wrong (basically, like big old block planes). Whenever we can, we take these woodworkers out back to the shed. Not for a whuppin’, but to the grinder, where we can transform a store-bought 14”-long bass-boat anchor into a tool that can work small miracles in wood.
I think it’s a simple process. But I want to present it in small steps and in detail so that anyone – even those at the beginning of the craft – can do this. Let’s begin by buying the right plane.
Too Much, Too Little
It’s easy to spend either way too much or way too little when buying a jack plane. If you have the cash, it’s tempting to buy a premium plane from Lie-Nielsen, Veritas, Wood River or Clifton.
I wouldn’t.
Doing so is (in my opinion) a huge waste of your money and the toolmaker’s effort. Plus, it’s like fishing with an ICBM. You can indeed trick one of these beauties into slumming as a real jack plane. But the premium tool was designed and manufactured to do so much more, so it’s just a cosmic and comic waste.
It’s also tempting to go to Harbor Freight and purchase this $14.99 miracle of pot metal and skin-lashing plastic. Or to go to eBay.com and pick out an old Stanley No. 5 that came from the bottom of the sea. Or sneak into Cracker Barrel and remove a wooden-bodied jack that’s affixed to the walls with Torx screws.
For the love of hashbrown casserole, please do none of these things.
The dirt-cheap planes from Grizzly, Anant, Harbor Freight and all the other overseas makers are trouble with a capital Chromium. Their cutting irons (and I’ve sharpened a lot of them) are banana-shaped, inconsistently heat-treated and alloyed with anti-rusting elements that make them as pleasant to sharpen as a lemon gummi bear.
Usually the handles of these planes are plastic or poorly shaped wood that will – without any additional assistance – make you hate handplaning. And the machining on the tool is usually crap, as well. I’ve handled hundreds of these planes since the late 1990s, and they don’t ever seem to get better or worse.
As to wooden-bodied planes, I love them. Adore them, in fact. But they don’t tend to survive well over time. Thanks to wood movement, abuse or being plumb wore out, their wedges don’t hold well. Or they hold too well. And they just need a lot of love to get them working. Yes, you can do it. No, it’s not as hard as hippocampus surgery. But for your first plane, I recommend you get an early Stanley No. 5 jack plane with an iron body.
Wait, Don’t These Stanley Planes Stink?
Stanley has made planes that rival both Lie-Nielsen and Harbor Freight. It just depends on who was running the company at the time. In general, early planes (made before World War II) are nicer than later planes (made after the war). But very early Stanley planes can be problematic as well because they are missing key innovations, or they have odd (read: hard-to-find) replacement parts.
For me, the sweet spot is Stanley planes made somewhere from about 1902 to 1924. That sounds like a small window of time, but Stanley made a lot of planes during that period, and lots of them survive.
To learn to date a plane (I mean to find out its age; not its turn-ons), I recommend you become familiar with one of the many handplane dating charts. Here’s the quick-study guide: buy a plane that has one, two or three patent dates cast into the tool’s body, right behind the frog.
Once you’ve spotted one of these planes, look for the obvious. Are the handles beautifully shaped rosewood? Uncracked and unsullied? Is the tool rusty? Are large hunks broken off its body? (Basically, it’s like searching for a human mate.)
One caution: If an old tool looks like it’s brand new, my instinct is to skip it. If it is indeed perfectly preserved and functional, it will likely be expensive. If it has been “restored,” the previous owner might have “over restored” it, removing metal that you’d rather still have. Third option: The tool has always been defective/cursed and has frustrated every user who has picked it up.
There are lots of these tools out there. So, don’t get frustrated if you can’t find the one you want after 10 minutes of scrolling. I purchased the tool shown in these photos for less than $40, and I overpaid a bit to get one that looked especially clean.
Avoid Replacement Parts
It’s tempting to buy a jack with a missing part, a cracked tote or an incorrect knob and think: I’ll just buy a replacement part. Parts are out there, but their costs (plus shipping) add up quickly. My experience is that it’s best to wait patiently for a sound example with all its bits intact.
That includes the iron and chipbreaker/cap iron. Many woodworkers replace these instinctually. While that might be a good idea for a smoothing plane (or it might not…), it’s rarely necessary for a jack plane. Plus, I have found that Stanley’s old irons – if they haven’t been abused – are easy to sharpen and tend to stay that way. Plus, they fit the tool without any fuss. So, look for an iron with a lot of life left in it, and a chipbreaker that isn’t dogmeat.
Last word on replacing parts: It’s tempting to embark on making your own replacement front knob and tote before setting up the plane for use. I recommend you do that after you have surfaced 100 boards with the existing handles. By that time, you will know if you like the handles and how you would change them (and you’ll probably notice that you can’t improve much on Stanley’s early handle designs).
Bottom line: Don’t waste your money. Invest a little in an old tool that has been cared for and the next steps will be easy.
— Christopher Schwarz
Coming Up
Clean & True Critical Surfaces: Part 2
Grind the Iron & Fit the Chipbreaker: Part 3
Set Up & Use: Part 4
Surrounding the workshop of Wyatt Childs Inc., the acreage is stacked with antique stonework, ironwork and enormous millstones and grindstones. It’s literally a garden of earthly delights, and I spent as much time as I could wandering in the yard during the French Oak Roubo Project.
But I missed something, and it took Will Myers to set me straight. After we cut off work on Tuesday night, our clothes shot through with French oak, Will guided me to a huge chunk of rock I’d missed before.
It was the stone architectural ornament shown above. In the center is a skep that is flanked by scales (not sure what is on the scales; they don’t look like coins). Below is written: Industry Labor & Wait.
Bo Childs said the ornament came from an English bank building where it was above the door. The “& Wait” part is what deposit holders are supposed to do when they save their money. I was a bit confused by the American spelling of “labor” on an English bank building, but it’s a big world with a lot of odd spellings.
Will turned to me and said: “You have to have it.”
The piece is massive – it weighs 2,600 pounds. My head spun when thinking about how to move that into the storefront’s biergarten 500 miles away. Apparently I was so dizzy that I asked Bo how much he wanted for his pretty rock.
Bo said: “You have to have it.” And he quoted me a price that I couldn’t say no to.
Getting the rock to my door in Covington is easy via LTL and a liftgate. But the last 20 feet are going to be a creative and careful endeavor. I don’t want my obituary to say I was crushed by a symbol of capitalism.
We are reducing the number of days we are opening the storefront to the public in 2020 from 12 days to two days – June 13 and Dec. 12, 2020.
We’re doing this to make more time to edit books and build furniture, which is what I prefer to do at all times when I’m not sleeping or chewing.
All of us enjoy the Saturdays we are open the public. We’ve made some good friends and met some people from far-flung places during the last four years. But the “press” part of Lost Art Press needs to come first, and I’m behind schedule on several book projects.
I’m putting out the news now in case you want to visit during the last two open days in 2019 – Nov. 9 and Dec. 14, 2019. During the December 2019 open day – like last year – we will have the clock in the machine room, which we would like to show you.
If I get back on schedule, we might increase the number of open days in the future. But until then: nose, please meet grindstone.
